What reduction of working time?

* * *

Introduction

One of the bourgeoisie's strengths is to present the reforms needed for the
accumulation of capital as working class conquests. This is the case of the
so-called 'reduction of working time' preached by all the unions and left
parties of the world.

Constantly in search of extraordinary surplus value, the capitalists are
always obliged to renew, to modernise their means of production in order to
increase productivity. The increase in productivity comes essentially from
a more continuous, more organised and more intense use of the productive forces,
among which the most important one is the labour-power. As capital changes
its methods of work, it changes labour-power as well as men themselves since
it changes the relation of men to their work. For the workers, it always means
an increase in the exploitation rate; first of all because the salaries are
never related to the production of wealth; secondly because any increase in
productivity means an increase in the labour intensity. Under capital, the
use of new machines always brings along an increase in the division of work,
a more severe, more scientific and more rational organisation of working time,
which submits the proletarian to more severe controls, regulations and obligations.
This means the 'dead times' chase, the struggle against absenteeism, the development
of the mobility of the labour force, the continuous supervision, the acceleration
of rates...

Facing the perpetual reinforcement of exploitation, a steady claim of the
working class has always been and still is the reduction of working time.
This is why the bourgeoisie tries to identify this proletarian claim with
the "legal limitation of the working day" (without which the social
work could not be made more intense and more productive of surplus-value)
in order to change the workers' movement into a permanent reform of capital.

The legal reduction of the working time has nothing to do with a reappropriation
of time by the workers and is only a formal reduction of the working time,
which is only measured in terms of quantity by the chronometer without any
care about its quality (intensity, density). This measure, far from being
a step towards the emancipation of the proletariat, only aims at adapting
the labour power, the living labour, to the new conditions of exploitation,
to let the workers accept to be more and more dependent of the capitalist
machines, to reinforce the division of their lives following the needs of
capitalist production, making them, in their work and in their leisure, simple
reproducers of surplus-value.

The reduction of working time as the expression of the proletariat's emancipation
from its secular work slavery will only be real in a situation of hard struggles
between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie where the working class tends
to impose by force its own claims of destruction of capitalism.

It is therefore necessary to distinguish increase in productivity and intensification
of work. Under capital, both concepts are bound because productivity cannot
be increased without reinforcing the labour intensity and the exploitation
of the proletariat. Under proletarian dictatorship, to the contrary, the increase
in productivity will aim at reducing the labour intensity, reducing the exploitation
of the proletariat.

Communism, because it does not need to accumulate capital and, to the contrary,
answers human needs, because it will free the development of productive forces
from the shackles of the capitalist mode of production, will reach a much
higher productivity through the abolition of work.

The permanent increase in surplus-labour

While the serf, for example, works half the time on his own land and the
other half on his lord's -in this way, the exploitation appears clearly-,
the salaried worker receives a salary for his whole day of work, which seems
then to be paid completely. The exploitation of free work is hidden by the
abstract character of work under capital: "The individual works of isolated
individuals do not acquire a character of social work in the form in which
they have been carried out in the process of production but they acquire it
only in the exchange, which represents an abstraction of the particular objects
and of the specific forms of work". (I.Roubine, Essay on Marx' theory
of Value)

Within the capitalist production, all commodities - including labour power
- to be exchanged, have to be equalised, reduced to the same denominator,
value or abstract work, whose measure is the social working time crystallised
in it, necessary for their production or reproduction. Any good is therefore
sold at its value (the law of supply and demand makes the prices oscillate
around an average). Now precisely, the worker sells his labour power by the
day while, for example, one hour of work would be sufficient to produce the
value necessary for the reproduction of his own force; by working one hour
a day, the worker would have produced enough goods to be exchanged against
his means of survival (food, clothes, lodging...). The salary is the payment
for this necessary work without which the proletarian would not be able to
preserve or reproduce himself.

In this way, by paying the labour power at its value, the capitalist can
appropriate himself the work performed during the rest of the hours of the
day without owing anything to the proletarian since he respects the contract
and the principle according to which any merchandise is sold at its value.
This part of the work which is stolen by the bourgeoisie is called surplus-work;
the value created during this surplus-work is called surplus-value; the rate
between the necessary work and the surplus-work or between the salary and
the surplus-value is called the rate of exploitation.

We have just seen the worker's day could be divided into two parts: the necessary
work and the "surplus-work". The capitalist mode of production can
only develop itself by reducing the necessary work and by increasing the "surplus-work".
For the communists, the rate between necessary and surplus work is fundamental:
not only the reduction of daily working time is compatible with the extension
of surplus-work, but it is one of the elements used to extend this free work.
In order to increase surplus-work, the capitalists have the possibility to
lengthen the working day but the workers' struggle for the reduction of working
time has been one of the elements that pushed the capitalists to increase
surplus-work by reducing the necessary work (1).

"But when the surplus-value has to be produced by the conversion of
necessary labour into surplus-labour, it by no means suffices for capital
to take the labour process in the form under which it has been historically
handed down, and then simply to prolong the duration of that process. The
technical and social conditions of the process, and consequently the very
mode of production must be revolutionised, before the productiveness of labour
can be increased. By that means only can the value of labour power be made
to sink, and the portion of working day necessary for the reproduction of
that value be shortened." (MARX, Capital)

If a capital A, by new production techniques, can produce a larger amount
of goods with less workers than its rival, it will have the possibility of
selling its products at a lower price than its rival (it has to if it wants
to sell the largest amount of goods), but, of course, at a higher price than
their cost of production (less living work is crystallised in them and therefore
less salary and more profit) until the value of identical commodities on the
market decreases as a consequence of the generalisation of the production
process and until the extraordinary surplus-value disappears. This is the
process that pushes capitalists to find new technical innovations because
it is only by winning rival markets that they can win this extraordinary surplus-value.

So every capitalist is forced to increase surplus-labour by reducing necessary-labour
and therefore, increase productiveness and decrease the social work crystallised
in each commodity and, in this way, decrease their value. This value decrease
is also applicable to labour-power, which means a reduction of necessary labour.
Temporarily, this decrease in the value of labour power gives the possibility
to achieve an extraordinary surplus-value. But in this need for reducing necessary
labour lies the basic contradiction of all the capitalist system, between
the permanent processes of valorisation and devalorisation. Although the only
source of profit, surplus-value, is nothing but the living labour included
in any commodity, the increase in productiveness (or raising of the organic
component of the capital) always means an increase in dead labour (technological
development) or regard to living labour (labour power development). Hence
the achievement of extraordinary surplus-value increasing the falling rate
of profit.

One can therefore understand that the investment expenses grow continuously
and tend to lower the profit rate (rate between profit and invested capital).
In the same time, the constant decrease in the value of commodities causes
an accelerated devalorisation of constant capital: buildings, machines. The
redemption of these machines has to be made in an always shorter time; this
requires a maximum production rate of the working forces: it is necessary
to work the machines night and day to extract enough surplus-value and decrease
the cost of labour power. This is why, under capitalist production, any increase
in productiveness means an increase in the proletariat's subjection to the
machines, to dead labour.

Productiveness today is the productiveness of capital. For capital, the interest
does not lie in producing two goods instead of one for the sake of reducing
man's labour to its half. What counts before all is that, in these two goods,
a higher surplus-value will be produced to compensate the devalorisation of
the commodities produced by half as much living labour. Any increase in productiveness
causes a relative decrease in wages (compared to the quantity of wealth produced),
a decrease in necessary work and an increase in surplus-work. The basic reality
that the exploitation rate is relative because it is social and historical
makes us understand the growing antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie
and demystify the "social acquirements", the "increase in the
standards of living", the "reduction of working time"...

In Belgium, for example, we can see in the statistics of the "Universite
catholique de Louvain" that there has been a 11% cut in the working hours
between l960 and 1973. But what the bourgeoisie will not tell is that this
"progress" is due to the extraordinary rise in work productivity,
which allows the workers to produce the same amount of goods in 1973 as in
1960 in only 43% of the working time they spent that year.

If this rise in work productivity had entirely benefited to the workers and
had only been used to reduce the working time, it could have been reduced
not by 11% but by 57%, which would mean a working time of less than 20 hours
a week! (See the article "Maintien du pouvoir d'achat, un mot d'ordre
reactionnaire". In Le Communiste No 4).

To limit the cost of new investments as much as possible, the capitalist
is obliged to reduce the development of constant capital. To increase productivity,
he will try, through technological developments, to intensify the work of
the proletarians. This need for increasing the work intensity will force him
to reduce the working time, not in order to reduce work but in order to increase
it.

The duration of working time: an expression of the world-wide force relationship
between classes

Historically, capital has developed itself by imposing work and extending
the working day to its very limits. The descendants of serfs, who were dislodged
from their lands and sent to the first textile manufactures, were heaped up
in new industrial centres, locked up in workhouses. Those who tried to escape,
the "vagabonds", were pursued, killed and used as examples to terrify
the proletarians. The Niggers and American Indians as well as the European
serfs all ended up in the industrial convict-prisons, factories and plantations.
All of them went through the misery of the "primitive" expropriation
and it was under the terror of weapons, of hunger and misery that they were
educated to the last form of exploitation: salaried work.

All the bourgeois who know a little about history admit these facts but do
not see the irreversible class antagonism revealed by them. To the contrary,
they only see them as excesses from a past that progress has definitively
eliminated, from times that are through. 0ne of their big arguments is the
reduction of the working day (16,14,12,10,8 hours). These are supposititiously
absolute facts, that could convince the workers that capitalism is not such
an inhuman system (they will then talk about the "leisure society",
the "free times era" as a fair reward for so many years of efforts,
services and work for capital. But this only shows the lies and dreams of
the stupid bourgeois understanding that substitutes the ideal vision of its
own class situation to the world's reality.

In the historical centres of accumulation and concentration of capital, the
big cities (in South America, North America, Europe...), the legal working
day effectively tends to be reduced, but this is due only to the fantastic
development of productivity which allows capital to stabilise class struggle
and force social peace through giving "advantages" to certain categories
of workers, while in the same time they increase the rate of surplus-value
extraction.

Complementarily, the only possibility of capitalist valorisation in deserted
zones is to maintain a very long working day that can compensate the low organic
composition of the capital, making the labour conditions of these workers
look out of time.

In some parts of the U.S.A., for example, (which are a symbol for a "developed
society"), the extraction of surplus value takes the form of slavery
(see the article in "Comunismo" No 7 on the working conditions of
the clandestine immigrants in Texas, Florida, Virginia...). The flourishing
multinational food company "Gulf and Western" has its offices in
ultra-modern buildings in New York where the employees work under the U.S.
legal standards, and gets its raw materials in Haiti where everybody knows
that sugar plantations are real slavery-camps (work without rest, miserable
wages, military surveillance...).

But salaried work does not only reveal its penal servitude character in the
USA: see the camps in Siberia, South Africa, Mauritania, Mali, as well as
the concentrationary "communities" in Cambodia, China, Haiti...
In all industrial centres, (non-declared) labour is an essential stabilising
factor of the economic life. New York, Chicago, and Hong Kong all have their
"sweatshops", and the crowd of home-workers: "after eight or
nine hours of work in workshops, the employees take their piece of work home
where they work on another five or six hours,... the work conditions in the
workshops are unbelievable: it is not rare to see thirty sawing machines piled
up in a small room without any airing nor opening but the front door"
(Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1982). The "clandestine" dress-making
workshops of Paris are well-known. The factories for children in Napoli and
in Bangkok don't even surprise the bourgeois newspapers any more... "The
number of children and teen-agers of less than 15 years who work throughout
the world has increased in the last two years. Today we can count 55 millions
of them, but experts state that this number is by far underestimated, compared
to the real extension of the phenomenon (Le Monde, 10-11/5/1981, after an
investigation of the International Work Office).

"Everywhere, the industrial subcontracting helps evacuating part of
the workers from the big metropolitan industry... In Italy, the small industries,
reanimated by the crisis, at the limit of legality and of clandestinity, are
often considered as the basis of the "second Italian miracle". In
Japan, recent investigations have shown that subcontracting is an essential
key of the present success of Nippon products in the world market... Forms
of home-work, subcontracting techniques and "sweating systems" that
we thought had disappeared in the West, have a new development as controlled
segments of big industry. Thus, the dispersed factory (or, as the Italians
call it, the "diffuse industry") has to be analysed as a particularity
of the new organisation of production." (Le Monde Diplomatique, January
1982).

By showing these facts as excesses of the capitalist system, or as remains
of pre-capitalist societies, not only does the bourgeoisie extenuate their
real importance but it also gives credibility to "normal", "legal"
work. But in these "clandestine" workshops as well as in the "legal"
factories, the same commodities are produced to valorise capital and in both
cases the worker has to sell himself to survive. The needs of the proletarians
working there are never satisfied: unemployment for example mainly touches
the "official" industry workers, and it is the same bourgeois misery
that feeds the black markets and industrial convict-prisons. For us, there
is no real difference between the proletarian labour in New York and in the
Siberia mines, it seems to us vital to assert the similitude of wage-slavery
all over the world (see the article on "worker-aristocracy" in "Le
Communiste" No 10/11).

Some bourgeois claim that the "historical" diminution of labour
time is a materialisation of worker acquirements, an evidence that capitalism
and socialism can coexist and that there can be a progressive way from one
to the other. It is always dangerous for the bourgeoisie to alter labour time
reductions it gave up under class struggle pressure without compromising the
credibility of its social system (i.e., the 40 hours in France in 1936, the
8 hour day in "Soviet" Russia and in Germany after the revolutionary
struggles of 1917-1923).

After the crushing of the revolutionary wave of the twenties in the name
of the workers' well-being, the bourgeoisie had to increase productivity all
of a sudden in order to increase the exploitation rate. The deep and violent
changes in the organic composition of the capital (increase in constant capital
in proportion to the variable capital) led to an exacerbation of competition
and conflicts between the different accumulation centres of the capital. The
valorisation of capitals meant taking the rival productive forces or destroying
them. It is those mutual destruction, especially of labour power, the generalisation
of work-camps to all the planet, following very closely the "social acquirements"
of the working class movement.

In 1948, when the English parliament voted the first laws of limitation of
the working day (the Factory Act), it was already to put an and to a worker
agitation that threatened to turn into a civil war. After the 10 hours legislation
that also brought a wage-cut of 25%, the "working class, declared as
criminal, was struck by prohibition and put under the suspect law" (Marx
- Capital). In the same way, in France, the reform promulgated after February
1848 "dictates at the same time to all workshops and manufactures, without
distinction, the same limit to the working day (...) and puts as a principle
what had been obtained in England only for minors and women" (Marx -
Capital). But it was immediately followed by the bloody slaughter of June
insurrection in Paris. With this link between "the constant pressure
of the workers acting from outside" and the legal intervention, the bourgeois
rapidly transformed the class struggle into a struggle for the conquest of
rights and the social laws produced by the state to reform its own system
as "social acquirements".

It was under the pressure of a possible proletarian revolt that the bourgeois
class unified, in spite of the difficulty, in the State, which represents
general interests. The laws reducing the working day appear when the division
of work comes to the point of making all industries dependent one upon another
and when it becomes vital for "everybody" to avoid social troubles
due to the excesses of some behind- hand capitalists, when these troubles
compromise the interests of capital. So it becomes necessary for social reproduction
to adapt the workers to their tools (which are continuously revolutioned)
and to their new living conditions. This is why, for example, the State makes
laws to limit the women's labour time and suppresses children's work, but
in the same time establishes obligatory school and a family code (obligation
of thrifty work at home).

But despite the reduction of labour time, the time of the worker is every
day more submitted to the capital's necessities. Would it be his working time,
the transportation time between his home and his working place, the time he
needs to be in order with the administration, the police, the unions, the
social security, etc., the time for professional formation, the time for taking
care of his professional harms, the time for reproducing his labour power...
all this social time belongs to the capital.

The social laws only materialise the bourgeois pretension to manage a production
system based on work slavery with a scientific and humanitarian legitimity.
They are nothing but formalisation of the bourgeois humanist and humanist
principles, that "the worker sells his labour power in order to reproduce
it and not to destroy it" and "the interest of capital itself is
to ask him a normal working day".

The so-called "historical" reduction in France

Affected by the world crisis, all states have to face their "growth
rate" -profit rate- collapsing. There is a surplus production of goods
and in the same time a quick devalorisation of constant capital; which force
the capitalists to reduce investments. To fight this investment crisis (called
"capital leakage" by the left and by the unions), the bourgeoisie
will always try to find a new "industrial restructuration" (discovery
of new organisation forms and of capital management). But the capitalists
are unable to understand and to fight the reasons causing devalorisation:
the growing contradiction between exchange value and use value. The measures
they take only postpone the unavoidable bankrupt of their industry and impose
the dominant class interests to the proletariat. By putting in question of
form (neoliberalism, or Keynesian politics, self-management, or co-management)
the causes or the answer to the crisis, the bourgeoisie creates its own weapons
to slaughter the revolutionary proletariat. The "false consciousness"
of the bourgeoisie comes from its dominant class position, which it has to
defend. Thus, behind the government's reforms, one will always find fundamental
class interests. With the "reduction of labour time to 39 h. a week"
as it is asked for by the Socialist government in France, it is the opening
of a new systematical battle against the proletariat.

All capital needs is to enslave more and more the labour power in order to
control its use, its cost, following the standards of valorisation, restructuration
and concentration.

By trying to show any increase in productivity as a simple mechanical perfection,
without recognising the unavoidable intensification of work that it lays on
proletarians, the socialist government shows a purely capitalist measure as
a "worker conquest" and pushes the workers to believe that their
own interests are those of national economy. Sacrifices, austerity, discipline
and work are the very principles of "solidarity" which the government
always refers to. Behind the so-called alternative: "either unemployment
or a distribution of work that would allow a reduction of working time"
we meet the same principles and the same reality: the absolute decrease in
wages submitting the proletariat totally to the bourgeois state.

There is a general tendency by all governments (whatever their political
"colour") to reduce the legal working time the "historical"
shift from 40 to 39 hours in France, the decrease in official working time
in manufactures has changed between 1970 and 1979 from 44.9 to 43.2 in Great
Britain, from 43.3 to 40.6 in Japan, from 39.9 to 35.4 in Belgium. From 1974
to 1980 the highest differences have been observed in Norway and Israel (4
hours). While the working time was 40.6 hours a week in France in 1980, it
reached 39.7 in the USA, 39.1 in Australia, 37.7 in Austria, 33.4 in Belgium,
32.9 in Denmark... (Le Monde, 16/2/82).

The whole protocol on "the reduction of working time" on which
both the French bosses and trade unions agreed is guided by the aim of making
French industry more competitive thanks to a more systematical use of constant
capital (the duration of use of the equipment in automobile industry reaches
6150 hours in USA, 4000 to 4600 hours in Japan, 3700 to 4000 hours in France
- INSEE Statistics) and more flexibility in the distribution of work (in the
USA as in Japan, the time-tables are well adapted to the needs of the market
and the overtime work is largely used, from 10 to 15% in Japan).

"The investments in industrial equipment have decreased by 12% over
1981": such was a title in "Le Monde" of 9 June 1982. According
to "Liberation" of 14 September 1981, "since 1973 any increase
in wealth has come from a better efficiency in production". In order
to fight the lack of investments, the bourgeoisie seems to use its machines
to the maximum by making them work day and night with a more movable and less
expensive mass of workers.

With the aggravation of world crisis, the work by teams and by posts has
been generalised. The posted work becomes a normal thing for one third of
the workers, among whom one half works on night teams. Steel industry, mines,
textile and paper industries used to have the most posted workers: up to 85%.
For a few years, this kind of work has spread to food industry and to the
services sector. From 1957 to 1977, the percentage of workers "in posts"
in transformation industry has more than doubled. This increase in posted
work is to be related to the increase in the record of productivity: the sum
of commodities produced in the Belgian industry has almost gone from one to
three between 1956 and 1977 (following the weekly bulletin of the Kredietbank
of 17 November 1978).

The French Prime Minister can say that those reforms will make the machines
sweat instead of men, that they will improve the relationship between man
and his work, that this will create new and more qualified employment, the
only statement of such measures is in contradiction with their promises:

- extension of posted work with a fifth team for non-stop work;
- generalisation of temporary work;
- extension of overnight work for women;
- week-end work;
- "dead time" chase so as to make the 35 hours 35 effective hours
of work;
- vulgarisation of overtime work, which will be paid only 25% more.

As Minister Auroux said: "To increase productiveness is not a mechanical
operation: it's more a sort of compliance of the wage workers". The work
conditions regulate the life of workers at the rhythm of capitalist valorisation;
the often-changing time-tables disorganise the rhythm of life of the workers,
of whom many are over-exhausted. According to the B.I.T., experiments have
shown that night work require more physical and nervous energy for the same
result and that mortality is higher among posted workers. Consequently it
is really an increase in work intensity and in proletarians' exploitation
that the "39 hours of the socialist government" aim at generalising;
this is what Pierre Mauroy calls "the improvement of the relationships
between man and his work" (2). For him, as for Stalin and for all capitalists:
"man is the most precious capital". No need to wait for Raymond
Barre's congratulations to the socialist government to understand that the
agreements on the "reduction of working time" was the beginning
of a big attack against the working class.

Only a few months after the legislation on working time reduction the socialist
government established what it called "pecuniary compensation",
which turned out to be nothing but a direct attack on salaries. New "solidarity
taxes" were required from civil servants, "solidarity" contracts
were settled between unions and bosses (wage- cuts from 1,6% at Gervais-Danone
and B.S.N. to 20% at Fleury-Michon): the left government generalised wage-cuts.

The increases in taxes, in the prices of manufactured goods and services,
the devaluation, the blocking of salaries, the decrease in unemployment benefits...
all are direct attacks on proletarians' real salaries and help in financing
the aid to industry through "solidarity contracts" (the enterprises
that reduce working time to 36 hours a week before September 1983 will be
free from social security subscriptions for each new employment resulting
from the "reduction of working time").

The constant increase in unemployment (more than 2 millions now under the
socialist government) contradicts the "socialist solutions" to unemployment.
As Minister Delors admitted that the shift from 40 to 39 hours did not create
new employment, the so-called reduction of work that was supposed to reduce
unemployment showed its true face: a systematic attack against the working
class. The new plans for employment of the French socialists mean nothing
but unemployment allowances, intensified work and general wage-cuts. The Mauroy
plans are but the repetition of those applied by all bourgeoisie in the world.

The French government, as any government, tries to distribute work in the
most productive way in order to, as an Air-France commander says, "compensate
the rigidity of the working time organisation, which often leads to insufficient
yearly use of more and more sophisticated equipment that are an obstacle to
the development of the productiveness of such equipment".

The principle directing the working time limitation is, consequently, a principle
of rationalisation, productiveness of capital and intensification of work.

Conclusion

In this text we have shown how capital always tries to recuperate the workers'
struggles and claims, which express their permanent interest to work less.
The formal reduction of working time (the government's 35 hours) corresponds
to an important increase in the exploitation rate and to the surplus-value
rate extracted from the proletarians.

In fact, the reduction of working time, from the capitalist point of view
(which includes all government's and unions' claims and promises), always
corresponds to a decrease in the necessary work so as to increase the ratio
of surplus work even if it is comprised in a day of 7 instead of 8 hours.

From this point of view, if the working day is reduced there must be an increase
in the intensity of the exploitation. The proletarian point of view is completely
opposed to this. The workers will always try to struggle to limit this exploitation
not only in duration but in intensity. The proletarians' interest will be
to really work less, which means to create less surplus value and to have
their salaries increased. The true workers' struggles and claims only correspond
to this historical perspective and are opposed to the bourgeois claims, to
the so-called "strikes for the 35 hours" of the government, which
mean nothing but capital's restructuration (hiding unemployment under part-time
work,...) and increase exploitation.

Since proletariat and bourgeoisie have existed, the workers' struggle has
expressed, even at the first level, the tendency to reduce working time, to
increase salary whether by sabotage, theft or by strike and to impose, at
least for some time, a reduction of working time and/or an increase in salaries.

Independently of any circumstantial claim expressing a permanent historical
tendency at a certain time, in a certain place (it is sure that in some struggles
the 40 hours are a real workers' claim, while in others it means the liquidation
of the struggle) what counts is the direct antagonism to the logic of capital,
to the surplus value production.

The interest of capital is to freeze any proletarian claim through legalising
it and making it a "worker victory", changing it into an increase
in exploitation. Hence the same difference of class existing between, for
example, the 1st of May, an international day of struggle, and its legalisation/transformation
into a holiday to the glory of wage slavery and between the meaning of the
reduction of working time that aims at suppressing salaried work and its legalisation/transformation
into a capitalist restructuration. Between the reduction of working time,
which corresponds to the proletarian interests, and the same formula applied
to capital's interests, there is all the antagonism separating the revolutionary
proletariat from the bourgeoisie.

Notes

(1) "On the other hand, the length of the working day also has its extreme
limits although very extensible. These extreme limits are given by the strength
of the worker. If the daily exhaustion of his vital force goes under a certain
degree, he will not be able to undertake a new activity. Nevertheless, as
we said, this limit is extensible. A rapid succession of weakly generations
will feed the work market as well as a series of strong and long lasting generations"
(MARX, Salaries, prices and profits).

(2) "Work kills or wounds, each day, in the world, 160,000 people, but
it creates even more mental illnesses (...). 1,200,000 people today suffer
of grave mental disturbances", (B.I.T. Report for the international year
of the crippled).